SPEAKER_03: Pick up your phone dipshit. Hello? Sax. Yeah, I'll be ready in like two minutes.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's go splash some water on your face.
SPEAKER_03: Take a couple of whatever you need some. And let's go. We're waiting.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, hurry up.
SPEAKER_03: Is your chance to get max airtime?
SPEAKER_01: Listen, free breaks out.
SPEAKER_03: That means you're going to get by default 33.3% of airtime is going to be your biggest week ever.
SPEAKER_00: Rain Man David Sacks.
SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the all in podcast with us today the dictator himself, Jamal
SPEAKER_03: poly hop at and the Rain Man David Sacks. I'm Jake how and the queen of quinoa quit the show. Where's that here? He quit the show and then can he quit? So we're looking for a science person. If you know anybody, email all science guy at the all in podcast.com if you want to apply for the science position here. No, he couldn't make it. He was moving. He's moving. He's moving. I guess we can say that without invading his privacy, but he's not going to be able to we do a show anyway, because there's so much going on. And I think we should start with this. Do we want to start with the COVID stuff again for the third episode in a row? Or do you want to start trying and then back into COVID? Oh, fuck COVID. I know we should just do COVID quickly, because I think, you know, as much as the audience
SPEAKER_01: complained about it, we got a lot of comments saying, why are you talking about COVID so much we were ahead of the curve. I'm predicting the soul new Delta wave. You know, we told people what was coming. I think it was a useful service. So people might not want to hear it. But it was I think, I would say we're probably two weeks ahead of the I think that we've gotten a couple things actually, right.
SPEAKER_02: The a couple weeks ahead of other people. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I mean, it was pretty obvious that this was going to race through the places that had low vaccination. And having the breakthrough cases is I don't think anybody anticipated that. And the thing we didn't Yeah, over the last week on Twitter, I'm seeing this big debate
SPEAKER_01: on whether vaccinated people can spread the Delta variant. And I'm like, guys, didn't you see the show two weeks ago, we covered this job. I got it. I was vaccinated. I got it from someone who was vaccinated. This is no, you know, Delta variant has slipped the vaccine. It still prevents the most serious cases, generally speaking, we need to see it as a spectrum of protection, rather than completely binary. But yeah, absolutely. You can get it and pass it on if you're vaccinated. Like we know that and we said, we told the audience that three weeks ago,
SPEAKER_03: the other thing we predicted was, you know, that this is going to be incredibly disruptive, and it's going to create another debate of lock and potential lockdowns and mask mandates. And most of all, we discussed and we you know, we had a I think a pretty vibrant debate between all of us about under what circumstances does your decision to not get vaccinated impact everybody else visa v the petri dish of the next variant that's coming. Hopefully that'll be less deadly, less contagious, which is tends to be how these things go. But we also predicted some people are just going to start requiring vaccines, vaccine cards. And you mentioned what's happening in France, and I don't know what examples you've seen this week.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I thought last week when you made vaccine passports, the main issue I thought, well, let's put it this way. I think that was actually turned out to be great moderation, because what has been the big issue all over the world since the last episode vaccine passports, you saw it with enough Tali Bennett in Israel, they are not taking any of this vaccine hesitancy. There's 9 million people in that country, 8 million are vaccinated, they're telling the last million, you got to go get vaccinated. He has laid down the law saying enough is enough a billion people have gotten vaccinated. It works. And for the last million of you who haven't gotten vaccinated, if you want to attend any function with more than 100 people, if you want to go to synagogue, if you want to go to a sports game, if you want to go to the mall, you have to be vaccinated or you are going to get tested that day at your own expense. Everywhere you go, it's going to be so they're going to make it a real pain in the ass until you get vaccinated. You then separately had Roger Goodell basically doing the same thing in the NFL saying to players you will first of all, all the coaches have to get vaccinated. There was an anti vax coach who got fired. And then they don't have as much power at the players because the players have a union. But Goodell said to them, Listen, if you don't get vaccinated, you're going to get tested every day that you go to work. And if the team if there's an outbreak on the team, and you guys miss a game, you're going to lose all of your salary, we're not going to put up with apparently there's a game last year during the during COVID, where it was a Ravens Steelers game. And half of the one of those teams, I think it was the Ravens half of the first string was out with COVID. Or they were in isolation protocol, because they're around players, you know, obviously, if you're in a locker room, one player gets everyone's gonna be exposed, right. So it turned out to be like one of the worst games that the NFL put on last year and get all saying we're not gonna put out product like that anymore. If you are the reason why the team misses a game, guess what you and all of your teammates are going to lose your salary. And since there's only 17 games in an NFL season, you're talking about real real money. So you had Goodell doing that. And now you have Facebook and Google basically coming out saying, in order to go back to the office, you have to be vaccinated. Now it's a little bit of the soft, it's sort of more of the the iron fist beneath the velvet glove because they are offering testing. So if you don't get vaccinated, you can get a test every time you go to the office by unlike Israel, which is making you pay for it. You know, Facebook and Google are so rich, they're going to pay for it. So basically, what you're seeing here is that government is not in the US, Biden, Biden to mandate federal workers.
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, you have to get tested weekly. This is beyond now debatable. I think the funny thing is the Republicans, I think somewhere along the way realized, oh my god, we're going to lose the midterm elections, they have found a way to find a single modality and behavior to steal defeat from the jaws of victory. You know, I think that the Republicans were probably trending to basically win back the house. And now I don't think that's the case. And you have a bunch of these red state governors who are literally flipping their shit right now trying to figure out how to get their folks vaccinated. Many of these people may not even be able to vote come midterms because they're either going to be dead or still sick. I mean, it's, it's, we've learned a lot. And at this point, you're being left with folks there. Again, there are people who do it for religious reasons, I get it. There are people that you know, are going to sort of like live off the grid and live by themselves. I get them to. But the folks that want to be attacks on the system or use public resources, I don't understand. And they're basically going to get singled out and discriminated against. And the carrot and the stick method here, I think is going to work because we saw a
SPEAKER_03: bunch of people sign up to get vaccinated in France once they said this, you can't go to a cafe or a bar. And I think that a lot of the people who are not vaccinated are probably enjoying going out and having a life. Danny Meyer, the restaurant tour in New York from Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, one of the most famous restaurant tours of all time, announced on CNBC this morning, that he'll be requiring vaccines for all staff and customers. What do we think of that restaurant saying you've got to show a backscarf on the way in if I love it,
SPEAKER_02: listen to me if I'm going to go in and I'm going to spend two or $3,000 on wine, and then a couple 1000 bucks on a tip. I don't want some asshole who's going to get me sick there. It's bad enough that I still may get sick. And by the way, Danny Myers restaurants are not like, you know, fucking, you know, Red Robin. These are extremely high end places. The idea that you can get a communicable respiratory disease and spend $5,000 is bullshit. untenable, untenable, non starter.
SPEAKER_03: Sax. I mean, listen, you you've you very interesting last episode, I felt like you were really trying to balance your belief in freedom. And people being able to make decisions to themselves with, you know, the reality that we can't be closed forever. How has the last week changed your thinking? And what do you think of the Danny Meyer?
SPEAKER_01: I like what Danny Meyer did in this sense, he wants to create a certain experience for his clientele. And he knows that his clientele are more likely to go dine in his restaurants. If there's a vaccine policy at his restaurants, he's not setting a policy for the whole country. He's setting it for his establishment. He has every right to be able to do that. And he believes that will help his bottom line. And he's probably right about that. Similarly, Roger Goodell, same thing. I mean, he took a tough line, because he knows that if he wants the NFL to put out a great product every week, they can't be canceling games because of COVID outbreaks. You know, they can't have the first string players out with COVID. So he made a smart business decision, I think people should have the freedom and the right to do that. Now, I still have, let's call it a reservation about government requiring it. Not because I don't see the benefit, I definitely see the health benefit, but just because I don't like giving government the power to, you know, stick a stick a needle in your arm. If you're a government employee, I do think the government has added power. We talked about this last week, they can make it a job requirement. And you know, what's interesting in California, California said, if you're a state employee, you got to get vaccinated. But the one group they singled out were the teachers. Because, you know, Gavin Newsom has no guts to stand up the teachers union whatsoever. And I find it so ironic that early in the pandemic, we had this big debate about whether the teachers would go back to school in the fall. And the teachers union said, we won't go back unless we're first in line for the vaccine. Well, guess what, they got that. Now they're saying they're not going to go back if you make us get back. I mean, you can't win with you moving the goalposts.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, people post, they want to work from home. They it's kind of ridiculous. It's one group that needs to do it most. And they should be the one it's kind of like the army and teachers and healthcare workers. They should be given a mandate. If you want this job, you must be vaccinated. You cannot be in the army in the military and not be vaccinated because we need you in close quarters on a helicopter to go whack Osama bin Laden. We can't have a COVID outbreak in the Navy SEALs. When we got to go.
SPEAKER_01: I'm okay with that. I think I think every employer has the right to required if they believe it's going to impact job performance. Now, I want to go back to the point that your mouth made about the midterm elections. I because I there's a part I agree with and a part I disagree with. So the part I agree with is that the republicans were cruising to, you know, a midterm shellacking and now the the whole vaccine hesitancy issue. I think there was a prospect of that causing damage to the republicans, not because most republicans are vaccine hesitant, but rather because republican politicians were not out front enough on getting vaccines. But look, there's a difference between reality and perception. Here's the reality. Every single republican governor, every single one has been vaccinated and has supported the vaccine. John McConnell is vaccine sports vaccine. Kevin McCarthy put out a statement you even have the house minority whip, scalise get vaccinated on on live TV. Why had he not been vaccinated because he already had COVID and he didn't actually think he needed but he got the vaccine anyway, to basically double down. You had Sarah Huckabee Sanders come out and say that she was getting the Trump she called the Trump vaccine.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, please. If they put the Trump logo on it, right.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she understands right. Like this is probably, you know, Operation light speed or warp speed or whatever was probably the biggest operation operation fuck up the midterms.
SPEAKER_02: That's what the republicans should call this.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Well, so look, I mean, the republican politicians in the main support vaccines. The problem is that they were being a little bit too quiet about it. As a result of that, you have the fringe people, the Marjorie Taylor greens, and so forth. They were occupying too much airspace around this issue. And, you know, frankly, you know, right now, I think that I think the democrats are going
SPEAKER_02: to keep the house.
SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily go that far. But because I think that I think the republican problem was not that they're vaccine hesitant, but rather that they were just being a little too quiet about it. But now I think that's changed. I mean, there is not a single major republican politician who isn't strongly in favor of vaccine.
SPEAKER_02: If the republicans can get their actual act together and actually get these, you know, Jason does joke about it. But I do think he's right in a certain way. Basically like this, this group of republicans largely, who refuse to get vaccinated, then they may be able to pull something out. But I think that it's going to have to require a little bit of backtracking and showing up as you said, by the mainstream republican political groups, and they just have not done a good job.
SPEAKER_03: It is a really simple offering for them. New information, new strain, new approach. Listen, we didn't anticipate Delta would happen. This is 10 times more people to save face basically, save face, you got a perfect offer.
SPEAKER_03: And listen, there's new information here. This thing is
SPEAKER_01: even the CDC hasn't officially changed their policy yet. I mean, it's coming, right? We know it's coming. They've always been behind the curve. We predicted the policy change on the show, anywhere from two weeks to two months before they actually do it. But look on the vaccine, I don't discern a difference in position on the vaccine itself between republican governors and democratic governors. They both are advocating it. They're both allowing private organizations to require it. But none of them, to my knowledge, have either had the guts or the temerity however you want to see it to actually require it.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love that word temerity. Not really used, not used enough. And just putting a capitalist before we move on to what's going on in China.
SPEAKER_03: We talked about implementing this and how do you implement it?
SPEAKER_03: Well, we don't need to have a national registry. People have vaccine cards, you bring your vaccine card, you show it. And then of course, people go to Well, what happens if you create a fact? Can anybody create a fake vaccine card? Yes, of course you can. But the FBI has put out a statement now because of Lollapalooza the music festival. They are saying do not buy a fake vaccine card because if you want to have no mask at Lollapalooza, you have to show your vaccine card and they said the FBI is tweeting about this. It's illegal, it endangers yourself and those around you. And it's a federal crime that could lead to hefty fines or prison time. Oh my god. Yeah. So show us your papers. Just get the vaccine and move on. Just get the vaccine folks. Why are we still dealing with this? It's quickly becoming a Darwin Award.
SPEAKER_02: This is quickly moving into Darwin Award territory. We are.
SPEAKER_03: I talked to my doctor and I was like, I want to get the Moderna or J&J, which one should I get? And they're like, you got the Pfizer already. I'm like, yeah, I want to take a second. And they're like, I don't think that's going to make a difference. I was like, I think it's totally going to make a difference. This was like when we got off the pod last week. And they're like, yeah, I was like, well, just give me the third shot of Pfizer then. And they're like, well, that's not necessary either. I'm like, I don't care if it's not necessary. I want it. Give me the third shot of Pfizer. And then I open up Drudge Report yesterday. And it's like third shot of vaccine of Pfizer in Israel or whatever. They're just going to start giving people a third shot. Yeah, I just want to get ahead of the curve.
SPEAKER_01: You're exactly right. But by the way, there's one other piece of news that came out that I think is very positive on COVID, which is the availability of these oral antivirals, the pills.
SPEAKER_03: That you can take when you get an early case of it.
SPEAKER_01: Right. So it's like what they have for Tamiflu with the flu. Like no one should ever die of the flu because Tamiflu is like completely effective at stopping it provided you take Tamiflu early in the case. So I think that, you know, with the reduced effectiveness of vaccine, what we're going to have to do is supplement the vaccines and the boosters with home testing. And then, you know, these oral antivirals so that you get you take a test, you discover you got COVID and you immediately get prescribed, you know, one of these these pills and the pharma companies are coming out. There's like three different pharma companies coming out with these oral antivirals. And at Freeburg, we're here. He could tell us all about it.
SPEAKER_03: Freeburg, explain the science behind this.
SPEAKER_02: You know what the science can go fuck itself. Hey, Danny Meyer, chill a great bottle of white burgundy because I'm coming baby. I'm coming. I'm vaccinated and I'm coming.
SPEAKER_03: Let's go baby, vax and ready to go. Oh my lord. All right, the China situation has been perplexing to me. You know, my position was always be careful working in China or investing in China. We're investing in Chinese companies because they could change the rules at any time and change the rules they have in the past year we talked about obviously and financial and Jack Ma going M.I.A. ByteDance, a CEO and founder, stepping down as CEO amid Chinese regulations and all the scrutiny. And then we have DD last week being pulled from the App Store in an unprecedented penalty where you're not allowed to download DD and the existing users can use it. And then on top of that, all the educational companies this week, we're told that they cannot operate as for profit companies. And these companies have gone public in Hong Kong and in the West. And this has caused such an acute effect SoftBank is clearing a bunch of its Uber position to cover their losses in DD. And then there is the story of Larry Chen, who is a Chinese education entrepreneur. He was worth 15 billion in January. Now he's lost 99% of his net worth. According to Bloomberg, he founded Gouto, take you though, or tech to do, which is a Chinese online touring firm, as we know, education is huge in China. That company, Gouto peaked at $140 a share in January and has fallen to $3 a share. Big sorted story there. 10 cent lost 100 billion in market cap in three days earlier this week as China cracked down on what they call the monopoly and music rights. So while we debate what happens with the monopolies here in the United States, China just literally told them, and here's the quote from the BBC article, the company and its affiliated businesses have been told that they can no longer engage in exclusive deals over music rights, and must dissolve any existing agreements within 30 days. I mean, this would be like Biden just saying, the App Store is now open, you have to let other app stores in Apple or, you know, just coming down and saying to Amazon, you can't sell Amazon basics anymore in 30 days, no more Amazon basics at the site. What are we? What do you think the end game is here? Is this a because China seems like they are very deliberate, and they plan in centuries, what is happening here?
SPEAKER_02: There's the short term and the long term. I think what's happening in the short term is that the same thing that we are talking about in the United States that sacks is, you know, very eloquently, basically, I think led most everybody in just really framing for a lot of people is this idea that, you know, we have privatized free speech, and we have put the distribution of information into the hands of three or four founder CEO oligarchs. That's also true in China. And when you look under the hood of the major internet companies, there's four or five guys that are in charge. And so I think that in the United States, politicians feel increasingly uneasy with those folks having power because it's applied indiscriminately. Trump gets banned, Trump may not get banned, this person gets distribution. This article is considered misinformation, that article is considered disinformation, this article is suppressed. It's a dangerous place to be. And in China, they were just like, enough's enough. So I think the short term as it relates to the internet companies was basically a realization that we are not going to allow any more devolution of power from the Chinese Communist Party to and into the hands of these internet entrepreneurs. So that was that was sort of like the move out of fear. They're scared they're gonna lose their power base. That's scared, I think they're just smart. And they were like, we're not going to allow this to happen. So they don't have to deal with Section 230 or any law like that. I think it was just a realization that we want them to understand who was boss. And so there was a wave of resignations, there was now all of this market cap upheaval. And this is now where we get to sort of like the appetizer.
SPEAKER_02: And I think in the appetizer, what they're basically saying is, we will control how money is made and who makes money. And I think that that sets up the really difficult thing that I think happens, which is about the long term. So in this thing, what's happening right now is China very firmly telling everybody, we are firmly in control, there is no private market, and there is no capital market without our approval. And that's a really big statement. And in fact, it was such a big statement that I think the Chinese security authorities and had like a conference call and Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, all these folks were invited. And the vice chairman basically, his quote was something to the effect of, we promise that any more changes will at least let you know. Not a there's nothing to see here, or there's nothing more to come. It's just more that as we decide new rules, we'll make sure that we give you guys enough warning. So it's very much firmly saying, we know exactly how money is made, we will decide who makes money in what way, and we're going to make sure that, you know, all of this wealth creation happens under terms that we define. And I think that the setup for the long term, the long term in China is complicated. It is an enormous demographic time bomb. We've talked about this before, by the end of 2100, China's population will shrink from 1.1 1.2 billion people down to about 700 million people. Right. And they had very progressive, quote unquote, under their framework, laws of one child policy to basically make it economically viable in the 60s and 70s. There was such a number of people, those people were able to get great jobs in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. And now they've realized, oh, wow, we made a huge miscalculation because now there is just not enough people. And so China is going to shrink. And I think that honestly, I think Xi Jinping probably thinks the simplest way to solve this is to basically nationalize a lot of the economy over time. And so if I was a betting man, which I am general, but I'm not in China because I just don't understand the market, it's super complicated. Well, it's a great casino. It's a stupid place to bet. I'm not going to say that. I just think that I don't know the market. Well, I mean, if they change the rules of the game.
SPEAKER_02: Hold on, let me just finish what I'm saying. I think that what we're starting to see is the beginning of nationalizations. And I think it's going to start in technology, universe, because those are the critical assets that the Chinese need to own for the future. So that's, in my opinion, what's happening. I think it's really important what's going on there. And yeah, Sax, when you look at this, we've been talking about, you know, this, these two great competitors,
SPEAKER_03: America and China, and who's going to win? How does China win? If this would seem not having a vibrant, entrepreneurial, you know, socialist, communist hybrid, is this the end of that experiment? And now it's just going to go all national. And then doesn't that make it easier for the West to win if China is just going to say we're going to, we're going to operate everything, and they don't have a competition of ideas,
SPEAKER_01: if they go that far? I think it's really interesting, actually, to compare what's happening in China with what's happening on the US in the US, because on the surface, both countries are having this debate about whether big tech needs to be reined in broken up, controlled. We're having that debate in the US, and obviously, they're having some version of it in China. But it's a little bit like the the civil rights debate, right, where, you know, we have our civil rights issue in the US. And you know, they have Shinzen, you know, they have the Uighurs, you know, it's like a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the way they react. And I think there's, I would say there's three main differences here between the Chinese approach and the US approach. Number one, data privacy, we have a concept of separation between private companies and the data they control, and the data that the US government can get its hands on. And the US government typically has to get a warrant and go through a corporate scene to get that data, what China is doing, they've passed a law, basically saying all these companies, your data belongs to us. If we want it, we get it, they're taking operational control over the data, and you know, they're going to use it. Okay, that's a big difference. Number two, I think that China seems to be really worried about these big tech companies, not just in terms of whether they might engage in anti competitive practices or consumer harm sort of those conventional antitrust concepts in the United States. But they're concerned about these big tech moguls becoming power centers in China. And you saw this with jack Ma, right? I mean, clearly, the CCP had a problem with the way that jack Ma had become a figure that people rallied around him, they looked to him, they cared about what he had to say. And all of a sudden, yes, the ant IPO was put on hold, but it was more than that, right? You know, this was not just like, you know, what the SEC would have done. All of a sudden, jack Ma disappears, he goes into some sort of house arrest, he comes out three months later, looking kind of emaciated. You know, they are putting the fear of God in, you know, these big tech moguls in a way that we would never do in the US. I mean, look, I don't want Tim Cook to engage in anti competitive practices. But I don't want anything bad happening to Tim Cook. I don't think the guy should be under house arrest. If he wants to donate his money to political causes and speak out as a private citizen, he has every right to do that. And I'll defend his right to do that, no matter you know how much I want, you know, Apple to be reined in that they don't have that, that again, that separate concept in China. And I think the last thing that's going on here, that's different, is you saw China put the kibosh on there are 34 IPOs of major China, Chinese tech companies that were scheduled to IPO in US markets, and they have sort of shut that pipeline down. And what it appears to be, they appear to be saying is that, you know, we've talked about reshoring strategic industries back to the US like pharmaceutical manufacturing, they seem to be saying we are going to reshore the IPO business. We do not want you big Chinese tech companies IPO on American markets on American exchanges, we are bringing that business back to China. And that is why I think you're seeing, you know, giant ripple effects now because I mean, to Tomás point about decoupling, we now it looks like are going to be decoupling our financial markets. And you know, that's why you're seeing, you know, gigantic hits in the valuation.
SPEAKER_03: That's a would you would you agree with me that the decoupling of these financial markets might be in the best interest of humanity, and ultimately, the decoupling of these two economies, if we don't see eye to eye about human rights, and how to treat people, maybe it's good that we have a little more distance between the two markets. I mean, it's hard to know if engagement is the better process, but it doesn't seem like the Chinese Communist Party wants to have anything to do with democracy, anything to do with free markets. They want to control all the markets. Yeah, I mean, you could see, but you know, in a way, the product that the US was exporting
SPEAKER_01: to China was, was our financial markets and not in I think, a good way, right. So that I think the bad version of this is when China is able to buy up ownership in critical strategic centers in the US and that affects people's speech rights over here. But this is not China, buying up ownership in the US. This was China acting as a consumer of US financial markets. And I think it's different, right? When we're selling products over there, that helps correct our trade balance, right? This is why I don't have a problem with Elon selling cars over in China, he's helping our trade balance. Okay, but they're kind of canceling that. They're kind of saying we're going to reshore this industry, we want to have a domestic, you know, stock market.
SPEAKER_02: This is creating a mono economy, right? It's like, it's going to blur the lines between public and private ownership. And it's going to basically make it one huge pot from which the Chinese government can take and put it back into as it deems fit for the broader success of China as a whole. Right? So if you're a CEO, and they don't like you, you're going to resign, right? If you're a company, and they're worried about your propensity to be a little too frisky on your own, they'll rein you in, they'll either use cybersecurity law or something else. But the point is that I think that we shouldn't take this as free market regulators having their way. This isn't Lina Khan implementing, you know, some laws. This is a top down decision to nationalize large parts of the economy, starting with technology. And I know that for some people that may seem unfathomable. But if I'm a betting man, which I am, that's what I would bet on that this is the beginning of the beginning of an attempt to pull these companies in. I mean, at the at what David said is true. The Chinese government owns the data of Chinese companies. So at the end of the day, the Chinese government also owns the users and it also owns the revenues. It just hasn't told you yet.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, in a way, it's like the Chinese government in our government is trying to officiate the game fairly and create a really competitive, vibrant game. And I think what the Chinese government just said is the game's over like there is no game. Yeah, we know there's a game it just has it just has one because it has an Uber CEO.
SPEAKER_02: It made a bunch of CEOs, general managers and a large corporation that report through a reporting chain to one person, she should be.
SPEAKER_03: But there's no more game in terms of building companies and investing in China. Like, how is the West ever going to trust? How is Goldman Sachs or Sequoia, you know, launching a venture firm there or retail investors or hedge fund investors? How are they ever going to want to work to participate in that market?
SPEAKER_02: Because so look, for example, when you invest in China, right, or if you set up a fund, you know, there are two pools of capital, right? There's the local remain be denominated investment vehicles, and then there's the US dollar denominated investment vehicles. And they do that to segregate where the capital comes from. So it's not too difficult for the Chinese government to basically say, you know what, I'm going to actually make a constraint on dollar inflows so that, you know, the remain be denominated investment funds that are from Chinese investors into Chinese companies needs to be above a certain percentage, call it two thirds, right, or call it 80%. They can make all these decisions because these are all just rules that are completely under the control. So I think that people who don't think this is going to happen are probably not looking at the setup. The setup seems to be directing itself towards that outcome. And by the way, it makes sense for what Xi Jinping wants to do from that. But that's not my question.
SPEAKER_03: My question is, why would Masayoshi San or another entity ever invest in China? Because you look through the risks, and you got completely enamored by the population
SPEAKER_02: of the TAM. But what I'm saying now is, why would they do it again? Or are they not going to do it? No, but there are there are boundary conditions that would say that even before this, you would have had to reconsider the population is shrinking. There's a different demand side pull that's happening, right? Older people need different kinds of services than younger people. There's not enough younger people, there's too many men, there's not enough women. So there's not enough couples, there's not all of these demographic issues ultimately will get reflected in the economic reality, which is that smart investors would put money in China differently over time anyways.
SPEAKER_02: But I think that this is a bigger thing, as David said, which is if that's coming to pass, you want to control the pipes, because you want to control how that information is presented to people, your citizens so that they don't get pissed off. And then you might as well just own the economy, own the business anyway. I see this as being amazing for American tech companies, because I don't see who would ever
SPEAKER_03: want to be an entrepreneur, whoever has a great idea and wants to pursue it in China. I disagree with you. Why would you do it?
SPEAKER_02: No, I disagree with you. And the reason I disagree with you is...
SPEAKER_03: And we don't have access to their markets anyway. What company has access to their market?
SPEAKER_02: The difference is young, smart Chinese people for decades have been staying in China, in part because they could more relate culturally to Jack Ma than they could to Jack Dorsey. Okay, that just makes sense. And I understand that. And then the second is, we, like a lot of... Sorry, like the opposite of some other Western countries like Canada closed our doors.
SPEAKER_03: Why would the next Jack Ma start a company if they saw Jack Ma disappear?
SPEAKER_02: That's my question. Because you know what, if you're coming from China, and you can only make a billion versus 45 billion, I think you still take the shot. Okay.
SPEAKER_01: I think J. Cal is right in the sense, I don't think it's gonna be like a binary decision where all of a sudden everyone just stops doing business in China, but they're gonna be hedging their bets. I mean, if you were a Chinese billionaire looking at this landscape, your priority has got to be to get some wealth outside the country beyond the control of the CCP. You're gonna be buying Bitcoin, you're gonna be trying to get your money overseas. You have got to be very nervous about what's happening. Buying homes in Palo Alto?
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely. I mean, look, I think what President Xi is doing is fundamentally redefining the bargain between Chinese entrepreneurs and the government. And here was the original bargain, right? The great Chinese leader and economic reformer, Deng Xiaoping, basically set the bargain 40 years ago. And basically the bargain was this, we're gonna open up the economy and let you, the entrepreneur, get rich. We're gonna keep all the political power. So as long as you don't mess with us politically, you can get as rich as you want. That was the original bargain. Now President Xi is saying there's a new bargain, there's a new boss in town, and here is the deal that economic interests in China will be subordinate to national interests. Those national interests are defined by the CCP and I run the CCP for life. Exactly. And that is what is happening. And that is a big change.
SPEAKER_02: They just got layered. Here's a new CEO that they report to.
SPEAKER_03: This actually makes me very hopeful, actually, I think this is going to be like a spiraling down of their economy. I don't think it's gonna spiral up. I don't think so. I mean, who's gonna invest in their economy?
SPEAKER_02: Everybody, guess what, because if you want a shred of fucking lithium, if you want a battery, if you want nickel, if you want anything to happen, you need to work with China. They are incredibly smart and thoughtful. They have been strategic while we've been running around, you know, complaining, crying, talking about the kindergarten soccer game. They were doing the hard work. They were doing it for decades. And until we find solutions that can work around them, we need to work with them.
SPEAKER_03: I think they just throttled innovation and they just shot themselves in both feet. I think they're going to regret this decision.
SPEAKER_01: I would come out in the middle and say they've just attached a discount rate that now every investor has to consider political risk when they invest in China, because the future is very uncertain. The bargain is getting changed. And if you're an investor, you now have to take you're taking some huge push towards that.
SPEAKER_02: I agree with David. I think that's a better way I would refine what I'm saying by saying it's a distribution of risk where it's closer to Russia now than it is to the United States.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, there's an there's literally an act called the McGinn's McGinn ski act with ginske act. What is the act that Bill Broder's lawyer? McGinn ski?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_03: Because basically, in Russia, they were just killing people and taking their businesses. I mean, this feels like the equivalent in China. And I mean, literally, that was Bill Broder's lawyer, who was tortured to death. And I just don't see anybody wanting to invest there anymore. And it just does make the Bitcoin. In hindsight, it does look like they shut down Bitcoin, a couple of months before making these actions. So your point, David, they probably anticipated that people would start shipping their money out using Bitcoin. And so they banned Bitcoin. And now they're banning CEOs from having too much power. That was probably a sequential event. That would be very smart on their part, you know, can't be very smart.
SPEAKER_03: What does this do to like, the Sequoia capital, China, the Masayoshi San investing heavily there, Tencent investing here? All the Chinese LPs. Tencent has been very active in the United States investing in companies.
SPEAKER_02: All the Chinese LPs are fine. All the Chinese GPs are fine. All the Chinese companies are fine. I think David's right. It's just a discount factor. I do think it affects global dollar flows. And I think it's hard for a Western capital pool to allocate money to China without doing a little bit more work and applying a higher discount rate.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I have to believe that the conversations happening in these firms that have made gobs of money in China over the last couple of decades, it has to be are we living on borrowed time? How much more time do we have before China says that Chinese profits, Chinese return on investment are going to go to Chinese individuals and companies under our control? Because that's, that's the direction it all seems to be headed.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And how quickly can I get get out of these positions? I mean, how do you even get out of these positions? If this is the other thing I don't understand if they're going to reverse some IPOs? How does that mechanically happen? Are they going to just say it's a buyout?
SPEAKER_02: It's a second second transaction, and they'll just do like a buyout.
SPEAKER_03: So if Masayoshi Asan owns some amount of DD, they say, here's, here's the price per share
SPEAKER_02: that we pay you. Here's your cash, give us a share of chow.
SPEAKER_03: That's incredible. A forced sale at whatever price they determine. I know, I mean, like, I think these things will operate more efficiently than that, because
SPEAKER_02: you have a distributed shareholder base. So you know, China can't force a shareholder of DD to sell the shares because it's listed in an American Stock Exchange. But they but if DD does go private, the way that you know, the news reports are saying, Masayoshi is going to have to backstop that capital, I suspect it will be a Chinese organization.
SPEAKER_03: So they will take DD private again, and then buy out all of the shareholders who bought from around the world.
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, if that does come to pass, I think that is the that is an obvious signal that we're moving into sort of a more nationalization of critical resources. And China has determined that internet resources are critical. And I think that that's right, if I was in their shoes, that's exactly what I would do as well.
SPEAKER_03: Does that mean that we should be kicking out Chinese companies from operating in the US I TikTok, etc? No, but I do think that TikTok needs to get carved out of ByteDance, and it needs to have
SPEAKER_02: a completely American cap table. But that shouldn't be a government edict. That should be something that the ByteDance investors and board are scrambling to do right now because otherwise, that equity value may go to zero ByteDance should be a half a trillion dollar company. It probably is a couple hundred billion dollar company now, which means that it probably lost half of its market value. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_01: Crazy. I think I think there's a few things for us to worry about there. I mean, I like the idea of out competing China by having freer and more open capital markets and allowing anyone in the world to invest in our companies. I think the issues with TikTok are more around data. You know, we know now that any data that ByteDance has belongs to the Chinese government. This isn't just a TikTok issue. It's any company, any US company that's doing business in China. Look, it applies to Zoom. Okay, look, Zoom. We're on Zoom right now. Zoom is not a Chinese company, but as a giant engineering team in China, what are the data implications for that?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they stopped routing their servers. Remember, they had some servers routing through China. But I do think they're going to have to shut down and sell off whatever their assets are in China, that's going to be untenable to have a communication platform. You know, it's kind of like Huawei, right? We don't allow Huawei to operate and we're gonna have to do that with software, right? There's been a big CRISPR breakthrough. 65 year old man named Patrick Dougherty was suffering with a disease in which his protein was misshaped, misshapen, building up in his body destroying important tissues, such as nerves in his hands and feet. He watched the same disease kill his dad. And here's the quote had watched others get crippled and die difficult deaths from this disease. And it's a terrible prognosis. He entered a trial utilizing CRISPR, the gene editing tool, and researchers reported the data indicating that the experiment treatment worked well. The study Dougherty volunteered for is the first in which doctors are simply infusing the gene editor directly into patients and letting it find its own way to the right gene in the right cells, in this case, the cells in the liver, making the destructive protein the advance is being held not just as not just for Amy Lloyd doses patients, but also as a proof of concept that CRISPR could be used to treat many other much more common diseases. It's a new way of using the innovative technology. My thoughts?
SPEAKER_02: I think this is a really important breakthrough. And what it allows us to do now is see a world where, look, if you if you think about the two different paths of the following idea, you're going to make a solution to a problem. If the problem was an internet company, or you wanted to make a product, what you would do is you would go to Amazon Web Services, you'd be able to consume a whole set of abstractions. And then you would build a light amount of programming, which is essentially like the application logic of your app. Right? I think a lot of people listening understand that idea, because that's what they do. Here, what we're getting to a place is now soon, we're going to be able to view biological problems in the same way. So we're building all these small little building, I don't want to call them small, but building these very important building blocks, that is very much akin to the building blocks we needed to put together the first set of computers to put together MS-DOS, all of that allowed us to create Windows, Windows allowed us to actually access the internet. And there was this in-seriatim development of things that happened. And I think that we're on the verge of that, and that's what these kinds of breakthroughs really show us, which is that you can view. So for example, in a different company, they've created these mRNA gate arrays, logic gate arrays. So if you're a chip designer, you would understand how to basically create electrical function, in part using gate arrays. But if you reduce a biological function to the same idea, now that same person has a translational ability to solve a different problem that they didn't have before. So I think what we're saying is that we're seeing this platformization, this AWS-ification of a biological toolchain with things like CRISPR and all of the other modalities that need to stack on top of it so that the next person can view it as a programming problem. And I think that that's a really exciting path that accelerates a lot of this development. But this is an enormously important breakthrough because it validated a lot of what CRISPR was beyond a lot of theoretical innovation that up until now was basically what it was known for. And a lot of investment had gone into companies that were trying to do things, but this is the first really important one. The funny thing about Intelli is that it's been public for like seven, eight years, and it's just been toiling, toiling, toiling, toiling. And then the last little while, obviously, it's gone absolutely crazy because of this breakthrough.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and related to CRISPR creates its first genetically modified marsupials after years of using the gene editing technique CRISPR to genetically modify everything from vegetables to lab rodents. Researchers have used it to edit one of the hardest target shots marsupials, the MIT Technology Reports. I guess it turns out they're very hard to edit, and we're now editing marsupials and changing things like their hair color. So brave new world. Freeburg was here. The Freeburg ratio will be off the charts. All right, wrapping up, we have...
SPEAKER_01: Pretty incredible. Just one thing to add to that. I mean, I think what it shows is that these COVID vaccines are just the first product, the first breakthrough product of this mRNA technology. There's going to be a lot more. And what I wonder about is this category of vaccine-hesitant people, they're kind of like in the technology world, you have kind of a spectrum of early adopters, late adopters, Luddites, people are actively against technology. Laggards. Well, I mean, Luddites are even more...
SPEAKER_03: Laggards and then Luddites, yeah. Yeah, Luddites are even more violently opposed.
SPEAKER_01: I think the original Luddites, I think the original Luddites were in England, they lost their jobs at some factory, and so they've broken to the factory with sledgehammers to destroy all the machines that replaced their jobs. So there's clearly a spectrum. And what I wonder about is that if you're on sort of the Luddite end of the spectrum with respect to biotechnology, I mean, are you going to have a materially worse life because you're not getting the benefits of all these vaccines and all these treatments? And I mean, COVID could just be the first example of this. Well, I mean, if you build on it, it's sort of like we're going to create a two-class
SPEAKER_03: society, one that is not only dealing with all the maladies and cancers and living longer, but we haven't even started to think about, well, taking somebody who's already in great health and what can you do for them? So oh, you know what, you can be two inches taller, you could add 10 IQ points, you could run faster, you could have higher blood oxygen, whatever. I mean, we could genetically modify people to stay underwater for 10 minutes and be better processors of oxygen like other mammals are. You could have superhumans. I mean, that's basically where this is going. And that unlocks a whole nother level of ethical and moral considerations. But you're right, there could be a group of people who are like, I don't want to touch any of this, and they die at 60, 70, 80 years old. And then we got another class of people who embrace this and they have 20 more IQ points, and they live to 120. No, I mean, it sounds funny, and like science fiction, but that is in the realm of possibility in our lifetimes. There's a lot of great science fiction written about this whole sort of transhumanist idea.
SPEAKER_01: A book series I really like is Nexus by Ramez Naam, who actually was a developer at Microsoft and you know, that became a writer and he writes with I'd say a high degree of sort of accuracy and specificity about these technologies and how they might evolve. People should be sure to check out that book.
SPEAKER_02: Jason, be honest, if you could actually increase anything in your body through this gene editing, what would it be? Just throw anything out there. But the first thing I could say is anything out there?
SPEAKER_03: I would increase my muscle mass 100%. Increase my muscle mass. So the percentage of fat would go down, not in reality in absolute terms, but just in percentages.
SPEAKER_02: So this CRISPR thing was a public company called Intellia Therapeutics. But I want to throw a shout out to another startup that seemingly I think may have had a breakthrough this week called Form Energy. And the reason why these guys are interesting is that they've built this incredibly massive long duration battery out of iron. Now why is that important? We have really simple ways of harvesting iron from the earth. It is literally everywhere. Everywhere you look, iron exists. It's not so true for nickel. It's not true for cobalt. It's not true for manganese. It's not true for lithium. It's not true for all of these other specialty chemicals that we need in order to build batteries. But these guys have solved a very complicated technical challenge that will allow you to store energy cheaply, which has huge implications for electricity and grids. And so a big shout out to these guys at Form because if it looks like what they said they did is true, it's a really important breakthrough that will have some important ramifications. It's amazing, by the way, to see progress. You wake up and you read these things and you're just like, God, this is incredible that there are people working away on shit that really matters.
SPEAKER_03: It's almost as if there's like, one group of people we talked about cynicism in a previous episode recently. There's one group of people, whether you're in the founder circles, or capital allocator or a journalist covering the space, who understands it, there's a technical, you know, explosion going on here, and innovation that is going to solve a lot of problems. And they have another group of people who think that all these problems are intractable. I'm kind of looking at this, you know, what happened with COVID. And I was talking to my wife about global warming. And I was like, feels to me like we can solve global warming. Like feels like it's very much in our control. And there's another group of people who feel like it's over and don't have kids because the whole planet's gonna go on fire.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think Elon tweeted this out. And I think we've talked about this now with respect to China. But you know, we have an enormous problem in the world in general, which is that unless our birth rate is positive and accretive, it has huge implications to progress, right? If you just like, if you eliminate or you decrease the denominator of the global population, the odds that there's another Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos that are created are just lower. And so net of anything else, a declining population rate, particularly in Western countries has huge detrimental effects to the world. And so all the folks that think that they're going to solve the ecology of the world by not having kids, it's a little misguided. The thing to do is to actually have a positive birth rate, find technological solutions to this problem, and allow what we've been able to do, which is a rising populace to basically be motivated to work and solve problems. And I think that we have to be very careful about that. Because if people don't get this right, they're going to take the wrong solution. It's not going to be a solution at all. And it's going to make the problems even worse. Could you imagine if the population of the earth shrank in half what it would mean in terms of productivity, services, the health care requirements that are needed the costs of providing those things, the economic viability of countries will go away, it would be a disaster.
SPEAKER_03: Yet there is a group of people who feel we should do exactly that. And not not a small group of people. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they think that I think I think the mistake is in thinking that human consumption is the problem. In specifically with respect to climate change or global warming. No, you can't see it that way. Because, look, humans in order to exist need to consume. And we're going to emit carbon as part of that process. The important thing to focus on is energy production. Are you shifting to clean production? Not because you're never going to shrink your consumption enough to basically eliminate carbon emissions. It has to be done on the production side. And one of the interesting things that's happening now, I think we should talk about is, in the in Europe, they're creating this new carbon trading plan. I think China's even trying to set up one of these markets. And so they're creating these new, you know, marketplaces to trade carbon permits. And I think the most exciting part about this is that it gives an incentive for for innovators to create new technologies that actually take carbon out of the atmosphere. They're called negative emissions technologies. Because what happens is if you have a technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere, you can now sell a permit on the exchange that gives somebody else the right to emit that carbon. And now those technologies, those those those nets, the negative emission technologies, it's unclear whether they really exist yet, but no one's going to create them if there's not a customer for them. And that's what's really cool about these new tradable permit schemes is they create a buyer for for those nets. And I think that's ultimately how we're going to solve this problem of climate change. We're not going to do it through reducing human consumption. Like we're gonna have to go back to the Stone Age, if you don't want to emit carbon. It's about moving to clean production of energy and creating negative emission technologies.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let me just build on that for a second. There's, look, there's a bunch of cap and trade systems, China basically has a carbon tax system in place. The big thing that none of these folks have gotten to yet. But I think if you look at the laws in Europe, they're going there is the idea of a carbon tariff. And I think these carbon taxes, if they actually exist properly, will look like a tariff. What does that mean? Let's just say you're Britain, and you want to import a Volkswagen from Germany. If Britain has a carbon tariff, that says basically, you need to account for all of the emissions that went into making this car. And I'm going to assess an import duty that basically maps to that. I think that that's where the world is going. And that's probably, David, to your point, it's going to be a really big value unlock because the amount of money that will get both made but also destroyed in that process will be incredible. And that's where we have a chance to really reimagine consumption in a different way. Like there are just so many categories. I saw this interesting stat. If you look at CPG companies, companies like Procter & Gamble, Clorox, and you compare them to the places where they sell their goods like Walmart and Target, every single major big box retailer has basically declared a net zero emission strategy in the next five to 10 years. Not a single company on the CPG side has actually any plans to do anything meaningful anywhere near 2030, 2045, 2050. And when you look under the hood, those companies like P&G and Clorox are enormous emitters, enormous. So even though you walk into a Target and Amazon and you try to make yourself feel good thinking to yourself, I'm buying something that's zero emissions, it's not true. It's basically that Amazon will bear the cost of getting to net zero, but the products that you actually consume are horrible for the environment. And the amount of fossil fuels that went into it and the amount of plastic that will then get put into the ocean, it's tremendous. And so moving slightly more aggressively beyond these cap and trade systems into something that looks more like a tariff, I think could be really important for the world. And we're going to need to do it.
SPEAKER_03: There are multiple ways to do it. I don't know if you guys saw Elon backed the XPRIZE carbon sequestering project, which is $100 million prize. And you can do this in multiple ways. You can do it at the factory. There's the one trillion trees.org. I don't know if you saw that where they're trying to plant a trillion trees because that's the original way to sequester this carbon. So there's going to be like three or four different ways to do this. And if there's an incentive to do it, yeah, that is going to help for sure.
SPEAKER_01: Part of why there's such political disagreement over this is because you look at approaches like the Green New Deal. I mean, I think they understand the problem, but what they're proposing is always on the consumption side is basically politicians picking and choosing how people are going to consume carbon, whether it's, you know, cracking down on private planes to factories. I mean, again, taking us back to the Stone Age, nobody wants to, no one's saying, I think, wants to support that kind of totalitarian principle that the politicians get to tell us how to consume. But this is why I think these market based solutions where you say, look, carbon emissions are obviously an externality. If you want to emit, you need to basically pay the correct price for carbon emissions. And we use the money that you pay as some sort of whether it's a tax or whether it's buying a permit, we use that money then offset into negative carbon emissions. It's a market based system where the government controls the externality, but they don't dictate how people get to consume carbon. And I think that's the right balance. And we don't really have that type of balanced conversation in the US yet, because you've kind of got one side that says they want to save the planet, but they want to control everything. And then you got the other side saying, Well, look, I want to save the economy because your plan the Green New Deal is going to destroy it. What we need is, is again, a market based solution to this.
SPEAKER_03: And I guess the criticism of a market based solution is you're basically giving people a way to a the most cynical interpretation would be you can pay to pollute, you can just you can pollute all you want and just pay a fine, essentially. But that's not the right way to look at it, you're actually offsetting somebody else's capturing what you put out there. And depending on the rules of the road, if you had to capture 50% more than you put in, you could create a formula there, right? I mean, there could be some formula that over time, there's been a lot of fraud in this
SPEAKER_02: market, like, you know, people sell these carbon credits from, you know, certain forests. And there's this joke, which is like, there's been a tree that's been sold like 80 billion times because it's like, you can't really verify, you can only really estimate the amount of carbon sequestration that, you know, for example, a tree actually does in the first place. And so there's been just a lot of, unfortunately, you know, fly by night, unreliable, non trustworthy ways that this market has evolved. People have been waiting for decades for this carbon trading market to really step into high gear, which is why some folks think the more aggressive plan will just be introduced tariffs and let the market, David, to your point, sort it out.
SPEAKER_01: Jonathan, what do you think the prospects are for these negative emission technologies? I can't believe that a solution as low tech as planting trees is going to solve the problem. And algae. Yeah. Yeah. So the question is, what do you think, assuming we create the market, the demand for negative emission technologies, the permits to emit, what do you think the prospects are technologically
SPEAKER_01: that innovators are going to come up with these solutions?
SPEAKER_02: I do think that we are a couple of breakthroughs away from these things being non issues. So I'll give you a couple of examples. If you look at like, I'll just use batteries as an example, because where I'm spending a lot of time, when you look back and like you ask yourself, like, how did we decide to make the batteries the way we make them? You know, was it some like, you know, broad survey of every single chemical composition and all these different structures, and we realized that, you know, a composition of nickel and manganese and cobalt was the right thing to do? Or lithium and iron and phosphate? It turned out that it was mostly like a handful of people decided, and we all just been iterating around the edges ever since. So one of the solutions to a lot of these problems is to actually go back to first principles. The problem is that as these industries get built up, and you know this, you have so much PP&E, like so much equipment, so much investment in physical capex that's happened. The idea of switching platforms is almost impossible because it's not economically viable. So we are in this situation today where a bunch of solutions have been proposed, David, to solve that problem, right? The problem with carbon capture and other things and negative emission technologies is that they're extremely expensive, they're very inefficient, they require an enormous amount of energy themselves, and it's not clear that they work. So what's happening? One is that there's been some pretty novel innovations in moving people past some of these basic problems by looking at the periodic table to try to find different ways of solving things like energy storage, which has huge implications to climate. But the second is that we are pushing the boundaries of physics in different ways as well and that's where there's going to be the potential for an enormous breakthrough, specifically around superconductors. So what is a superconductor? It's something that allows an enormous amount of energy to basically trans through it. Now we have this issue which is that you can actually create superconductors in highly controlled environments that are extremely, extremely cold, but they have incredible performance characteristics that would revolutionize power and energy transmission and storage. People have been innovating in bringing that up to room temperature. In that breakthrough, which I think you will see in the next 20 to 30 years, it's just a complete sea change of how we think about this whole problem. So I think the short term, we're innovating in the periodic table. In the long term, we're figuring out how to bend the laws of physics. And I think that those are probably the two most practical solutions to a lot of these things that remove the constraints that we've created. And again, the constraints have been completely human defined, which is the sad thing. They were not necessary from the start, we could have made very different decisions, had we known these problems were going to be as big as they were, you know, the way that we make plastic didn't have to be this way. Right, the amount of petroleum that we use, it didn't have to be in this specific way. But this is where we are.
SPEAKER_03: And there are direct air capture technologies, DAC, which is basically an energy issue, you can literally suck the carbon dioxide out of the air.
SPEAKER_02: And again, another another issue of material science, because the the substrates that you use tend to be relatively inefficient and sort of really activate them, you're pumping a tremendous amount of energy through there.
SPEAKER_03: That's the issue is can you get the energy and I think when we talked about the small reactors, the small modular nuclear reactors, if energy is free, or it's solar based, you could you could kind of get a virtuous cycle going here.
SPEAKER_02: That's essentially what superconductors allows you to see is a world where you basically have limitless free energy.
SPEAKER_01: It sounds like the thing that we all agree on is that this problem is ultimately going to be solved by innovation. And this is the problem I have with so many of the political proposals is, you know, our ability to innovate is a function of the size and scope of our economy and the incentives and rewards for innovation and the freedom for entrepreneurs to do their thing. And if you crush that, yeah, you know, with government mandates, you won't get the innovation we need to get out of this problem.
SPEAKER_03: We can easily innovate our way out of it. And it requires some individual to say, I want to dedicate my life to it. And then what is the motivation to do that? And who are the capital allocators who are going to give them the billion dollars to create this? I spent a bunch of time so on the capital allocator that will give billions.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, I did a survey of the superconductors. Here's an example. And here's what I found of the of the four folks that I found, who are all the each individually doing things in superconductors that I think are incredible. They're all immigrants. Every single one. We're not born in the United States.
SPEAKER_02: You could you they are so fucking happy to be here. They feel so lucky. And they don't understand why everybody complains all the fucking time.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, complaining is there is a disease of constantly complaining about stuff. And if you count the number of times you complain every day, and it's more than two or three times a day, you need to get your head examined. You're probably just talking yourself into anxiety problems. Stop complaining, start building. I mean, these problems are solvable.
SPEAKER_02: There is an immigrant in in the United States right now that will figure out how to conduct electricity without resistance, it will transform the world. And we are so fucking lucky that that guy came here to this country and we have the chance to give the guy a billion dollars.
SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite movies is Wag the Dog with a great movie and Rob De Niro. And Dustin Hoffman plays this producer character.
SPEAKER_01: And every time there's a setback, he's like, oh, this is nothing. I remember we made this movie and three out of the four lead actors died and we recast the movie. It's like, this is nothing. And, you know, that's sort of his catchphrase is he's got this can-do attitude where no matter what setback happens, he just makes it. He's like, oh, this is nothing. We got it. And that's kind of the attitude you need if you want to be an entrepreneur is there's
SPEAKER_00: going to be so many setbacks. You got to be like, oh, this is nothing. You figure out a way around it.
SPEAKER_02: This one of the guys that are working on superconductors showed me his data for the last 10 years. And what's interesting, David, to your point is he had a four year period where he took a huge step back, where basically, like, you know, he had this superconductor. He's like, it works at, you know, I'm just going to use simpler numbers here, but like, you know, minus 300 Celsius. He got it all the way up to minus, you know, 100. And then it went back to minus 200. For four years. Could you imagine the mental devastation? And I said, how did you deal with it? He goes, ah, you know, basically, he's like, ah, it's nothing. Yeah. And thank God for that guy. It's interesting.
SPEAKER_03: I just listened to Quentin Tarantino's on a podcasting tour because he's got a new book. He wrote a novel out of the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood characters. And I just started listening to it. And it was just fantastic. Listen on Audible. And Brian Koppelman from the moment interviewed Quentin, I listened to it yesterday on my bike ride. And he was just talking about how he just never gave up. And he had written true romance. And then he wrote, what was the other one he wrote at that time, natural born killers,
SPEAKER_01: natural killers. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And he was just talking about how the first movie nobody would do, then he wrote the two screenplays and nobody would do and then he got to reservoir dogs. And, you know, they tried to scrape together $800,000. And he kept asking, like, Why didn't you quit? Why didn't you quit? He said, Well, you know, I just, I figured it out. Like I figured out I had a voice and then nobody would buy my scripts because I was trying to do something innovative. And they were reading the scripts. And they didn't understand what I was doing in terms of innovating on how a movie would be with you know, how he does with Pulp Fiction, he changes the time and tells the storytelling in a nonlinear fashion. They say nobody understood it. But every time I read it, I realized I had a voice, it was my voice, it was getting better and better. And then people, you know, I sold those movies, and then he kept building them. And it was very inspiring to think about that take of like, he just didn't give up. And he just totally looked at work and he found his he found his own value in his own work, improving even without the external, you know,
SPEAKER_01: it's a it's a fantastic story. It's like one of those classic, you know, Hollywood or entrepreneur stories, he's working at a video store for years. And you know, he would start record, he was making his own movie, and he would film on the weekends. And then you know, he made a few hundred dollars every week, basically. And then he would rent the equipment on a Friday, because then they would only charge him for one day because it was the weekend. So he could basically record the entire weekend. And so he'd go off and record and, and then he'd have to go back to work. And he started making this movie, you know, one weekend at a time for like two or three years, and then he finally put the, he didn't even have the money to get the film developed. So finally, after three years, he gets the film developed. And he's unfortunately, it sucked. It wasn't what he was expecting. But during that time, he wrote to romance, which then got bought, he sold that screenplay that gave him a little bit of money. Then he wrote Reservoir Dogs, and that he met Lawrence Bender. And you know, Bender went out read the script. It was like, Holy shit, this is amazing. They raised the million or so bucks to make the movie. And then that kind of launched everything. And yeah, it's one of these, you know, amazing rags to riches stories. You know, they're kind of rare. And they're more rare in Hollywood, they occur all the time in the tech industry. We see, you know, all such an interesting point.
SPEAKER_03: He said, they're like, you would never let you make that movie now. And you know, in another conversation, I think I listened to three podcasts with him, Joe Rogan, Bredi Sinelis, and then Brian Koppelman's, and all three of them are tremendous. But I think in the Bredi Sinelis, in the Joe Rogan one, he's like, Oh, they would never let you make that movie. He was like, bullshit, you can just make it. I just made it. I did you not see the last two films and how politically incorrect they were. And, you know, I don't care what Bruce Lee's, you know, fans think of how I portray Bruce Lee, he was a he was a bad actor. He was a terrible human being to his folks. And he his basic thing was everybody keeps waiting to ask for permission. He's like, I'm just gonna make my movies and let the chips fall where they may I'm not going to be censored. I'm not going to censor myself and I'll make my 10 movies and that's it. Game over.
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to tell a story. I want to tell this poker story. I get one last one.
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you tell your story. Tarantino success with reservoir dogs. I think it came out in 1991. That really inspired me to want to make movies, because I saw that somebody could make a movie outside the system for so little money. And that's why I made Thank You for Smoking. And we have another we have another movie independent movie coming out next year about Salvador Dali, which, you know, finally got made after about 15 years. So yeah, I mean, he's inspired a lot of people and he shows what can be done.
SPEAKER_02: This is a rags to riches story that involves Jake out. So I get invited. I get invited to the Harvard Business School to give a speech first and last time I was invited because I was disinvited Jason after that what happened but well, the back two rows walked out in the first five minutes.
SPEAKER_03: It was incredible.
SPEAKER_02: I get invited to do this thing. Obviously, it's in Boston. It's in wintertime. Right?
SPEAKER_03: Jacob, it was winter and it was like not a great trip.
SPEAKER_02: So socks, you know, I was like, Okay, Jacob, what are we going to do to spice this trip up and we invite big Al. Oh, okay. And we get on the plane and big Al says, Oh, you want to play a little poker? I said, absolutely. And I turned to Jake Allen and said, Jason, do you want to play? He's like, I said, you know, you guys can play against each other. And I said, Jason, why don't you deal? He's like, I'm not interested in dealing and I said, Jake, I'll I'll give you 10% of whatever I would like shuffle up.
SPEAKER_02: He deals the game for fucking six hours from LA Chinese poker to Boston. I smashed Big Al. I smashed Big Al smash. I smashed him. And then we go into the thing. We have like a nice dinner, blah, blah, blah. We go out, we have the thing at Harvard where I said something like, you know, I think an MBA is basically worthless. It's not a good use of your time. I think you should be out building things. The back two rows walked out, they were completely offended. And I did the speech, it doesn't matter. I get back on the plane and we're flying back. And at some point I realized, I said, Jason, what's the tally? And Jason says, I'm up 40,000. And I said, excuse me. You're up for it. And it turned out that I was fucking smashing him smashing, smashing. Anyways, the long story short of it was that we circled for a few times and then we finally landed and J Cal won $55,000. But then circling so you could win more.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what you got through the pack of cards at Jason and said, I never want to see you
SPEAKER_02: ever again and never want to have you fucking play poker.
SPEAKER_03: I went to the pilots and I told them, I'll give you five grand if you can make this flight last another hour. And they were like, yeah, we got a circle. They got, we just kept circling for an hour. I was like, I got to get another hour in.
SPEAKER_02: He lost $550,000 on a fucking stupid trip. He never even wanted to come. He didn't want to go to the best Michelin star restaurant in Boston.
SPEAKER_02: Oh my God. In Boston. It's so fucking stuffy by the way. It's so stuffy and so stuffy.
SPEAKER_03: And they're trying to, you know, bring, you know, 18 courses to us and, you know, big owls and big guys called big out for a reason. I mean, he's a linebacker. And they say the big he's like, I'll take this. I want to stay what he's saying. He's like, there's a stake included in the prefectures. You do the tasting man. You're like, Oh, you're tasting money. Fuck it. Let's go. I put more truffles on it. Like it's not truffle season. Sorry. It's like, okay, well, make it truffle season. And then they start bringing the food. And he wants to eat a steak.
SPEAKER_03: And they bring him I can't, you know, funny season a movie where like they pulled the
SPEAKER_02: tin and it's like a small piece of meat that's like a giant piece of parsley.
SPEAKER_03: And that's it. The steak was the size of a pack of wrigley's gum. I am not kidding. They took like a beautiful steak, and they just made a little rectangle out of it.
SPEAKER_03: He takes his fork. He puts it on and he holds it up to the woman who goes, Where's my steak? And he puts that was your steak. He's like, I want to stay.
SPEAKER_02: I want to stay on a steak.
SPEAKER_03: The whole restaurant. He's like, I ordered a steak. This is not if you ask him about the strip.
SPEAKER_02: He's like, I lost so much money. Yeah. I didn't eat. It was cold and it was cold. It's the worst trip ever. It was a horrible trip over and he is like, the woman's like, Well, how can we make you
SPEAKER_03: happy? He's like, bring me a steak. Well, sorry, we had we gave you a steak point the steak. How many steaks How many steaks are you gonna afford now that Robin Hood just went public?
SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, you know, it's right now it's my third biggest win. Uber calm and then this one. And you know, time in market. I think Robin Hood going out of 30 billion. There's a chance this could go 10 2030 x from here, I think it could be a trillion dollar company someday. 22 million members, even through all the craziness that we talked about on this podcast. You know, they're learning, they're fixing things and 22 million people using the product and they're going to launch so many other products as part of it. And all these young people getting financially literate. I know it's a double edged sword, but I kind of feel like this generation balance, it's
SPEAKER_02: it's it's better balance. It's important.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, can you imagine if we were in our 20s trading derivatives and options and just trading stocks all day, I wanted to do that. But it was too hard. You had to get a broker. It was $35 a trade when I started trading and you had to call Charles Schwab and put it in order.
SPEAKER_02: If all the things of all the things I could have done online in my 20s and 30s trading stocks, what didn't end up being high on the list, but you play a lot of cards. I mean, a lot of cards, right?
SPEAKER_03: But that's what these kids are doing. For them, this is, you know, in the same zone, a lot of them as sports betting, wagering, playing poker for money, they're learning. I don't know how you feel about it.
SPEAKER_00: That's from strategy.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, if you make a lot of mistakes early in your career, when you're making $100 bets or buying a 10th of a star, you know, small stakes, and you're gonna learn a hell of a lot. So I think the education part is, you can only learn by doing right, sacks. I mean, you can't learn in a thing. Okay, listen, there's been an amazing episode even without freeburg. We miss you freeburg. Come back next week. Let the conspiracy theories abound, but freeburg just was busy.
SPEAKER_03: He couldn't make it and we all wanted to we missed each other. So we wanted to see our besties. We love you freeburg. We love you freeburg. We love you freeburg. I got your freeburg. I got your freeburg. I'll see you all next time on the All In Progress. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_03: Let your winners ride Rain Man David Saccs
SPEAKER_01: We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West Coast.
SPEAKER_03: The queen of Kenoah.
SPEAKER_01: Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride. Besties are gone. That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh man. My haberdasher. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. My haberdasher will meet me at Blinstone. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just used to it. It's like this sexual tension but they just need to release it out. What? You're a bee. Bee. What? You're a bee. Bee.
SPEAKER_03: We need to get merch.
